10 ms·

That's actually how I conduct interviews. It's been immensely successful at weeding out candidates within 5 minutes; although most interviews are 45 - 60 minute

That's actually how I conduct interviews. It's been immensely successful at weeding out candidates within 5 minutes; although most interviews are 45 - 60 minutes. Basically, give them less than ten lines of code, ask them what it does, where are a couple bugs, ask what would you name the function, etc. Then we talk about how to improve it. I'd say, less than 20% of people I interview pass. It's actually amazingly low how many people can find a bug and communicate it. Half the people don't even tell me what they are thinking. And no matter how many times I try to work with them, act like their buddy, or w.e. they just kind of shut down. They think in their head, don't work through the problem at all.

marcosdumay 9y ago
> They think in their head I'm left wondering why this would be a problem.
- swimfar 9y ago
  for one thing, you can't get partial credit for ideas/work that only exists in your head. (Similar to why it's a good idea to show work on homework assignments and tests) If they sat there for a bit thinking about the problem and then provided a solution, I'm sure that would be fine. But that's not the situation he was describing.
- elgenie 9y ago
  Not being able to successfully and clearly communicate their thought process about a simple problem one-on-one is a bad signal for being able to communicate clearly about a difficult problem in a group setting or being a useful sounding board for technical ideas.
  - krzyk 9y ago
    Yeah, but if you shoot for elaborate ones you will get politicians/lawyers not coders. I don't have any source but from my experience mathematical/computer minded people are more likely to be introverted/talk less then arts people.
    - elgenie 9y ago
      Having a high signal-to-noise ratio is (obviously) also critical to communicating successfully about code / technical issues. Talking for the sake of talking or waxing poetic about the understood 5% of the problem at the expense of the 95% remainder is a negative signal too.
    - woodandsteel 9y ago
      >I don't have any source but from my experience mathematical/computer minded people are more likely to be introverted/talk less then arts people. I think you are right about that, but that just means that if they want to be effective members of a team in an organization, they need to work on their communication skills. Ability to communicate is something you can learn to do better. I know this for a fact. I used to teach public speaking, and students came out far better at it than they came in. The same is true for many other communication skills. See for instance Marshall Rosenberg's book Nonviolent Communication, which is great for interpersonal conflict situations. In fact, I think a lot of introversion is at least in part due to poor communication skills that could be improved with training and practice.
    - DiffEq 9y ago
      I studied engineering and went to an engineering school (EE, ME, CE, etc). I have had contact with many engineers on a daily basis, although I do not do this work anymore myself, and I have found that engineers can talk very well - actually I have never met one that can't and/or won't (the real problem is getting them to shut up). So in my experience, smart useful people are always able to communicate. There may be the occasional savant who is awkward or such but I have not met them. As for programmers - same thing. If they are any good they are more than able to talk the talk.
    - ewjordan 9y ago
      The article explicitly notes, though, that most excellent programmers were also excellent communicators. Effective communication doesn't necessarily mean you talk a lot or are extroverted. It means that you say things that matter when they matter, and that is a crucial skill to have in almost any work environment.
  - Fishkins 9y ago
    It's clearly important to be able to communicate about technical problems, but is it really necessary to be able to narrate your thoughts about a technical problem in real time as you're first having them? In my work experience I don't remember ever having to do that. I'd look at code & investigate a problem independently, then talk to someone about it afterward. I think that should be considered at valid approach to the interview.
    - dota_fanatic 9y ago
      It sounded from the example like the code under discussion was quite simple, "ten lines of code". So it's plausible your "look at & investigate independently" is allowed to happen, and should take less than a few minutes, say, and then this interviewer is inviting them to walk through things in a shared manner. In other words, from my perspective, you're not actually in disagreement with their method. They weren't saying "narrate in real time as you're first having [thoughts]". Practically nobody does that ever, or is expected to do it, except in other practices like mindfulness or therapy and what have you. They were saying they ask them to understand it, explain it, and then talk about improving it. OP's problem was with the candidates whom couldn't understand the code, and weren't even willing to talk about the state of their understanding so that the interviewer might help them walk through things further...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - delazeur 9y ago
    No. Thinking out loud is not the same as communicating a thought process.
- Jemmeh 9y ago
  Because you might need to work with the team at some point to help each other solve a problem.
  - DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
    At least in my case, there's a big difference between (a) discussing an open problem with a colleague, and (b) explaining what's going on in my mind as I'm attempting to solve the problem single-handed. I'm very effective at (a), and it's a skill that I've used many times as a software developer and/or grad student. But (b) is more typical in psychoanalysis sessions.
    - Jemmeh 9y ago
      May I ask what you feel the difference in the two is? I often have to explain a problem to my coworker and vice versa. It's also really helpful when pair programming. Just curious about your experience.
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        There's a weird dynamic in interview questions you rarely, if ever, get in the workplace: the person who actually knows about the problem is staying quiet while the one just starting to reason through it is doing all the talking about it. There's no back and forth -- you're not actually trying to help them solve anything -- it's someone who already knows the answer judging how much of it I can reason out in half-an-hour. I can't take 5 minutes to think it through, I can't stop talking for any significant amount of time without being told to narrate what I'm thinking about, etc. That's nothing like a workplace situation, where they'd be expect to hold up half the conversation, be providing input and thoughts on the problem, and I could just tell them I'd be with them in 15/this afternoon/tomorrow/etc. It would be more realistic if the interview didn't get to see the question before the interview, either. (And why I think design questions work better than coding questions -- you can do something they're not expecting in the design, ask more kinds of questions about the spec, etc which cause an honest back-and-forth.)
- BeetleB 9y ago
  I don't know if the following is what the GP meant, but: I've often had the pain of dealing with people who try to do it all in their head. Sure, one or two are good enough where it's not a problem. The rest of them? They keep getting confused and making mistakes. For things that are not very complex. If they had only written it out or drawn on paper/board, they would not get confused. It's most obvious when I try explaining some code's algorithm to them. They'll begin with understanding, and then 70% of the way through they'll keep getting confused because they couldn't hold it all in their head. I've often had to tell these people "Don't try to do it in your head!"
  - irrational 9y ago
    I have sort of the opposite problem with a coworker. This coworker only wants to talk through things and doesn't want to work them out on paper or a white board. The problem is that I can understand/remember almost everything I read, but have almost no ability to comprehend things that are being spoken (I suspect people are talking faster than my ability to think and parse what they are saying). I've talked to him about this to no avail. He just wants to talk things through, and then expects me to be following along and to provide insights when I have no idea what he is talking about. But if we can get it on paper or a whiteboard then I can reason about it quite easily.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      I know the type of person. I usually can't follow them either (less about them being fast talkers, more about them being bad at explaining things). I found myself to usually only half-listen to what they say, and letting the other half of my mind to reconstruct the problem independently by itself. Sometimes I fail, and then I need to ask them to repeat what they just said. Other times my mental model is spot on, and I can find their problem quickly.
    - BurningFrog 9y ago
      Can you keep some paper or a whiteboard around? You don't have to just accept doing your mutual conversation exactly as he likes it.
    - 9y ago
watwut 9y ago
"Half the people don't even tell me what they are thinking." Maybe they are introverted or simply need to think before they talk. Around 50% of people are introverted (less in usa). Many people are like that and simultaneously quite skilled. Moreover, some environments punish errors, so people who worked/studied there tend to be conditioned to think before talking. "And no matter how many times I try to work with them, act like their buddy, or w.e. they just kind of shut down." You are not buddies, you are interviewer about to decide whether they get hired. Many people shutting down might mean that they are not comfortable juggling "buddy" social role and expectations and "serious job interview" social expectations simultaneously.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rnprince 9y ago
  "You are not buddies, you are interviewer about to decide whether they get hired. Many people shutting down might mean that they are not comfortable juggling "buddy" social role and expectations and "serious job interview" social expectations simultaneously." Very good point.
  - kafkaesq 9y ago
    Right -- you don't need the "act like a buddy" part for this technique to work.
- bluGill 9y ago
  This is interviewing 101 though: establish a report with the interviewer if at all possible. If the interviewer tries to be a buddy that is in your favor to go along.
  - ice109 9y ago
    rapport
    - 9y ago
sulam 9y ago
I'd suggest making it more than 10 lines of code. Similar to kids finding easter eggs -- you want a reasonable number of things out there to talk about. It sounds like you try to get there by keeping it simple, but I would posit that some people's brains may lock up on a single block of code and having it in context or more there gives them something else to look at. Our brains are very bad at having insights when focused on the thing you're trying to have an insight about.
- hinkley 9y ago
  I bet you could go farther and make a really bad piece of code and introduce it as such, and then have them talk about just how many things are bad about it.
Jemmeh 9y ago
Just curious, if you've weeded them out at around 5 mins, why does it take 45-60 mins? Also, could you possibly just do an initial phone/Skype interview to save time in that case?
- irrational 9y ago
  I've been in this situation. Often we know within a few minutes whether the candidate is a good fit for our team, but for legal reasons we have to stretch out the interview so that the candidate can't make a claim against us. It would be better for both of us if we could cut them loose quickly, but we have to cover our butts because that's the kind of litigious society we live in. And their is an initial phone interview, but it is done by HR or our boss, neither of whom are technically proficient.
  - fwefwwfe 9y ago
    Isn't that why a lot of companies do tech phone screens?
    - Jemmeh 9y ago
      If it's because of anti-discrimination laws, can a technical phone screen be short? You could discriminate based on voice too so I'd think that'd still be an issue.
      - paulddraper 9y ago
        I think the advantage is that the phone screening is much shorter than an hour, for everyone. And "you haven't passed this interview" is less suspect than "I ended this interview early"
kafkaesq 9y ago
It's been immensely successful at weeding out candidates within 5 minutes Indeed, it's amazing how quickly people reveal themselves in this way. No whiteboards, no quiz shows, no grilling of any kind needed. Just: "tell me your story".
jimminy 9y ago
"They think in their head, don't work through the problem at all." Those are independent clauses. Just because the individual is not talking out loud, should not be indicative that they aren't working through the problem. Personally, I am a very visual thinker and layout visual models in my head for problems with high (3-5d) dimensionality that would take longer to draw clearly in 2D space while explaining all the traversals I'm mentally making. I would then reduce a solution, and explain that, or I apologize for zoning out. It became obvious to my office mates when I was working through and reducing a problem space, because I would "hang" on the thought. Sometimes I would be down, stuck in thought, for 15-30 seconds and according to them they could tell because my face loses emotion and my eyes flutter about.
paganel 9y ago
> Half the people don't even tell me what they are thinking. And no matter how many times I try to work with them, act like their buddy, or w.e. they just kind of shut down. They think in their head, don't work through the problem at all. As it happens most of my "aha!" code-related moments come when I'm either under the shower or when I'm washing the dishes. Very rarely did it happen for me to look at a piece code while in front of my computer and then immediately be stuck by what that code does or by some hidden bugs in it. It's all sort of mechanical, at least while I'm sitting at my desk. I'd say it would be very hard for people like me to reproduce that "aha!" moment during an interview, in front of some other people who expect me to have those moments of enlightenment right there and at that precise moment.
- surement 9y ago
  You could look at a more complicated piece of code, let them think about it for a bit, and if they don't have that aha moment you can still discuss it with them. For example, pick a problem you someone on your team struggled a bit with, something that you wouldn't necessarily expect a candidate to solve during an interview, and discuss solutions with them. I think you could learn a lot about the interviewee this way.
- Sacho 9y ago
  You can always find something to talk about in the code, though. You can start by just describing what each line does, in your opinion. Then you can go back and start to group the lines - e.g. "lines 1-3 are the initialization, lines 4-6 are probably intended to flurb the glorb", etc. Yes, it's possible that you can find an interviewee who is great technically but shuts down during an interview. The question is how much time and effort you want to invest digging for that person, especially in light of such studies.
- javabean22 9y ago
  omg, are you me. No ahas at interviews. Good to great ahas at random times. Fuck whiteboarding interviews.
gxs 9y ago
That's an interesting approach, but I wonder if you're screening for people who can speak and code vs just people who can code. I'm a product manager and I suspect I would do pretty well in this type of interview unless the snippet is especially complicated and/or esoteric. In that case you might be screening for people who can talk but not actually code or people who can code but might not be the best communicator. Interestingly enough, if youre optimizing for specific outcomes, you may not need to screen out the latter. Engineers who struggle to communicate but are productive can be extremely successful given the right environment - including having someone on the team who knows who to work with various personalities and is technical enough. Just some rambling, but it's worth pointing out given the scarcity of engineering talent. Not everyone is going to be Paul Bucheit, ace product manager and engineer all wrapped into one.
- lj3 9y ago
  > In that case you might be screening for people who can talk but not actually code or people who can code but might not be the best communicator. From TFA and literally the thing that started this whole thread: > Furthermore, no matter what, poor technical ability seems highly correlated with poor communication ability – regardless of language, it’s relatively rare for candidates to perform well technically but not effectively communicate what they’re doing (or vice versa).
  - meheleventyone 9y ago
    Right but that would also be true and exactly what you'd expect if interviewer mainly judged technical competency on ability to communicate. Since the form is self reported it's impossible to separate out whether the correlation is causal (poor communicators are poor technically) or due to interviewer bias (poor communicators have a harder time convincing interviewers of their technical chops) or even other factors (being flustered hurts both a candidates communication and technical skills). This is after all an advertorial piece of data spelunking not a study.
- TheCowboy 9y ago
  I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but it's a valid comment. Even if someone disagrees, you clearly communicated a point that adds to the discussion. Many are taking the article at face value, and are assuming there are no methodological flaws and that this study has been repeated enough times to invalidate any comments to contrary. It also didn't turn this topic into a "case closed" matter, as it's too big of an unsolved problem for that. They also just analyzed interviews, but did they monitor job performance after the interviews and for how long? Additionally, differentiating between being a "good communicator" and a "good interviewee" is frequently overlooked. People too frequently rationalize their own interview approach as not the problem. Most candidates accept that they could improve and perform better at interviews, but a lot of people conducting the interviews don't think their process could do better.
vellum 9y ago
Each moment of silence makes the interviewee feel more tense. Instead of staring at them, why not leave the room while they read through the code and collect their thoughts? You could even have HR do it. When they arrive, HR hands them the code and instructions. Then, they read it for 15 minutes, until you walk in.
avip 9y ago
I'm absolutely not an "introvert" of any sort, but if you give me something I've never seen and ask me to reason about it, you'd better take a very wide step back, stfu, and wait for 10m - if you're to get any results from my slow brain.
notyourloops 9y ago
That's great! I really hope interviews like that become more common.
dando 9y ago
When you put people under the pressure of not having a job, a time limit and worst, the pressure of having someone looking over you, bugging you, and judging you, it can be incredibly hard to think straight or say anything at all. You can act buddy all you want, but people aren't stupid. They know if they take a few extra seconds too long, you're already thinking "this guy sucks"

marcosdumay 9y ago

> They think in their head I'm left wondering why this would be a problem.

swimfar 9y ago
for one thing, you can't get partial credit for ideas/work that only exists in your head. (Similar to why it's a good idea to show work on homework assignments and tests) If they sat there for a bit thinking about the problem and then provided a solution, I'm sure that would be fine. But that's not the situation he was describing.
elgenie 9y ago
Not being able to successfully and clearly communicate their thought process about a simple problem one-on-one is a bad signal for being able to communicate clearly about a difficult problem in a group setting or being a useful sounding board for technical ideas.
- krzyk 9y ago
  Yeah, but if you shoot for elaborate ones you will get politicians/lawyers not coders. I don't have any source but from my experience mathematical/computer minded people are more likely to be introverted/talk less then arts people.
  - elgenie 9y ago
    Having a high signal-to-noise ratio is (obviously) also critical to communicating successfully about code / technical issues. Talking for the sake of talking or waxing poetic about the understood 5% of the problem at the expense of the 95% remainder is a negative signal too.
  - woodandsteel 9y ago
    >I don't have any source but from my experience mathematical/computer minded people are more likely to be introverted/talk less then arts people. I think you are right about that, but that just means that if they want to be effective members of a team in an organization, they need to work on their communication skills. Ability to communicate is something you can learn to do better. I know this for a fact. I used to teach public speaking, and students came out far better at it than they came in. The same is true for many other communication skills. See for instance Marshall Rosenberg's book Nonviolent Communication, which is great for interpersonal conflict situations. In fact, I think a lot of introversion is at least in part due to poor communication skills that could be improved with training and practice.
  - DiffEq 9y ago
    I studied engineering and went to an engineering school (EE, ME, CE, etc). I have had contact with many engineers on a daily basis, although I do not do this work anymore myself, and I have found that engineers can talk very well - actually I have never met one that can't and/or won't (the real problem is getting them to shut up). So in my experience, smart useful people are always able to communicate. There may be the occasional savant who is awkward or such but I have not met them. As for programmers - same thing. If they are any good they are more than able to talk the talk.
  - ewjordan 9y ago
    The article explicitly notes, though, that most excellent programmers were also excellent communicators. Effective communication doesn't necessarily mean you talk a lot or are extroverted. It means that you say things that matter when they matter, and that is a crucial skill to have in almost any work environment.
- Fishkins 9y ago
  It's clearly important to be able to communicate about technical problems, but is it really necessary to be able to narrate your thoughts about a technical problem in real time as you're first having them? In my work experience I don't remember ever having to do that. I'd look at code & investigate a problem independently, then talk to someone about it afterward. I think that should be considered at valid approach to the interview.
  - dota_fanatic 9y ago
    It sounded from the example like the code under discussion was quite simple, "ten lines of code". So it's plausible your "look at & investigate independently" is allowed to happen, and should take less than a few minutes, say, and then this interviewer is inviting them to walk through things in a shared manner. In other words, from my perspective, you're not actually in disagreement with their method. They weren't saying "narrate in real time as you're first having [thoughts]". Practically nobody does that ever, or is expected to do it, except in other practices like mindfulness or therapy and what have you. They were saying they ask them to understand it, explain it, and then talk about improving it. OP's problem was with the candidates whom couldn't understand the code, and weren't even willing to talk about the state of their understanding so that the interviewer might help them walk through things further...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- delazeur 9y ago
  No. Thinking out loud is not the same as communicating a thought process.
Jemmeh 9y ago
Because you might need to work with the team at some point to help each other solve a problem.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
  At least in my case, there's a big difference between (a) discussing an open problem with a colleague, and (b) explaining what's going on in my mind as I'm attempting to solve the problem single-handed. I'm very effective at (a), and it's a skill that I've used many times as a software developer and/or grad student. But (b) is more typical in psychoanalysis sessions.
  - Jemmeh 9y ago
    May I ask what you feel the difference in the two is? I often have to explain a problem to my coworker and vice versa. It's also really helpful when pair programming. Just curious about your experience.
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      There's a weird dynamic in interview questions you rarely, if ever, get in the workplace: the person who actually knows about the problem is staying quiet while the one just starting to reason through it is doing all the talking about it. There's no back and forth -- you're not actually trying to help them solve anything -- it's someone who already knows the answer judging how much of it I can reason out in half-an-hour. I can't take 5 minutes to think it through, I can't stop talking for any significant amount of time without being told to narrate what I'm thinking about, etc. That's nothing like a workplace situation, where they'd be expect to hold up half the conversation, be providing input and thoughts on the problem, and I could just tell them I'd be with them in 15/this afternoon/tomorrow/etc. It would be more realistic if the interview didn't get to see the question before the interview, either. (And why I think design questions work better than coding questions -- you can do something they're not expecting in the design, ask more kinds of questions about the spec, etc which cause an honest back-and-forth.)
BeetleB 9y ago
I don't know if the following is what the GP meant, but: I've often had the pain of dealing with people who try to do it all in their head. Sure, one or two are good enough where it's not a problem. The rest of them? They keep getting confused and making mistakes. For things that are not very complex. If they had only written it out or drawn on paper/board, they would not get confused. It's most obvious when I try explaining some code's algorithm to them. They'll begin with understanding, and then 70% of the way through they'll keep getting confused because they couldn't hold it all in their head. I've often had to tell these people "Don't try to do it in your head!"
- irrational 9y ago
  I have sort of the opposite problem with a coworker. This coworker only wants to talk through things and doesn't want to work them out on paper or a white board. The problem is that I can understand/remember almost everything I read, but have almost no ability to comprehend things that are being spoken (I suspect people are talking faster than my ability to think and parse what they are saying). I've talked to him about this to no avail. He just wants to talk things through, and then expects me to be following along and to provide insights when I have no idea what he is talking about. But if we can get it on paper or a whiteboard then I can reason about it quite easily.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I know the type of person. I usually can't follow them either (less about them being fast talkers, more about them being bad at explaining things). I found myself to usually only half-listen to what they say, and letting the other half of my mind to reconstruct the problem independently by itself. Sometimes I fail, and then I need to ask them to repeat what they just said. Other times my mental model is spot on, and I can find their problem quickly.
  - BurningFrog 9y ago
    Can you keep some paper or a whiteboard around? You don't have to just accept doing your mutual conversation exactly as he likes it.
  - 9y ago

watwut 9y ago

"Half the people don't even tell me what they are thinking." Maybe they are introverted or simply need to think before they talk. Around 50% of people are introverted (less in usa). Many people are like that and simultaneously quite skilled. Moreover, some environments punish errors, so people who worked/studied there tend to be conditioned to think before talking. "And no matter how many times I try to work with them, act like their buddy, or w.e. they just kind of shut down." You are not buddies, you are interviewer about to decide whether they get hired. Many people shutting down might mean that they are not comfortable juggling "buddy" social role and expectations and "serious job interview" social expectations simultaneously.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rnprince 9y ago
"You are not buddies, you are interviewer about to decide whether they get hired. Many people shutting down might mean that they are not comfortable juggling "buddy" social role and expectations and "serious job interview" social expectations simultaneously." Very good point.
- kafkaesq 9y ago
  Right -- you don't need the "act like a buddy" part for this technique to work.
bluGill 9y ago
This is interviewing 101 though: establish a report with the interviewer if at all possible. If the interviewer tries to be a buddy that is in your favor to go along.
- ice109 9y ago
  rapport
  - 9y ago

sulam 9y ago

I'd suggest making it more than 10 lines of code. Similar to kids finding easter eggs -- you want a reasonable number of things out there to talk about. It sounds like you try to get there by keeping it simple, but I would posit that some people's brains may lock up on a single block of code and having it in context or more there gives them something else to look at. Our brains are very bad at having insights when focused on the thing you're trying to have an insight about.

hinkley 9y ago
I bet you could go farther and make a really bad piece of code and introduce it as such, and then have them talk about just how many things are bad about it.

Jemmeh 9y ago

Just curious, if you've weeded them out at around 5 mins, why does it take 45-60 mins? Also, could you possibly just do an initial phone/Skype interview to save time in that case?

irrational 9y ago
I've been in this situation. Often we know within a few minutes whether the candidate is a good fit for our team, but for legal reasons we have to stretch out the interview so that the candidate can't make a claim against us. It would be better for both of us if we could cut them loose quickly, but we have to cover our butts because that's the kind of litigious society we live in. And their is an initial phone interview, but it is done by HR or our boss, neither of whom are technically proficient.
- fwefwwfe 9y ago
  Isn't that why a lot of companies do tech phone screens?
  - Jemmeh 9y ago
    If it's because of anti-discrimination laws, can a technical phone screen be short? You could discriminate based on voice too so I'd think that'd still be an issue.
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      I think the advantage is that the phone screening is much shorter than an hour, for everyone. And "you haven't passed this interview" is less suspect than "I ended this interview early"

kafkaesq 9y ago

It's been immensely successful at weeding out candidates within 5 minutes Indeed, it's amazing how quickly people reveal themselves in this way. No whiteboards, no quiz shows, no grilling of any kind needed. Just: "tell me your story".

jimminy 9y ago

"They think in their head, don't work through the problem at all." Those are independent clauses. Just because the individual is not talking out loud, should not be indicative that they aren't working through the problem. Personally, I am a very visual thinker and layout visual models in my head for problems with high (3-5d) dimensionality that would take longer to draw clearly in 2D space while explaining all the traversals I'm mentally making. I would then reduce a solution, and explain that, or I apologize for zoning out. It became obvious to my office mates when I was working through and reducing a problem space, because I would "hang" on the thought. Sometimes I would be down, stuck in thought, for 15-30 seconds and according to them they could tell because my face loses emotion and my eyes flutter about.

paganel 9y ago

> Half the people don't even tell me what they are thinking. And no matter how many times I try to work with them, act like their buddy, or w.e. they just kind of shut down. They think in their head, don't work through the problem at all. As it happens most of my "aha!" code-related moments come when I'm either under the shower or when I'm washing the dishes. Very rarely did it happen for me to look at a piece code while in front of my computer and then immediately be stuck by what that code does or by some hidden bugs in it. It's all sort of mechanical, at least while I'm sitting at my desk. I'd say it would be very hard for people like me to reproduce that "aha!" moment during an interview, in front of some other people who expect me to have those moments of enlightenment right there and at that precise moment.

surement 9y ago
You could look at a more complicated piece of code, let them think about it for a bit, and if they don't have that aha moment you can still discuss it with them. For example, pick a problem you someone on your team struggled a bit with, something that you wouldn't necessarily expect a candidate to solve during an interview, and discuss solutions with them. I think you could learn a lot about the interviewee this way.
Sacho 9y ago
You can always find something to talk about in the code, though. You can start by just describing what each line does, in your opinion. Then you can go back and start to group the lines - e.g. "lines 1-3 are the initialization, lines 4-6 are probably intended to flurb the glorb", etc. Yes, it's possible that you can find an interviewee who is great technically but shuts down during an interview. The question is how much time and effort you want to invest digging for that person, especially in light of such studies.
javabean22 9y ago
omg, are you me. No ahas at interviews. Good to great ahas at random times. Fuck whiteboarding interviews.

gxs 9y ago

That's an interesting approach, but I wonder if you're screening for people who can speak and code vs just people who can code. I'm a product manager and I suspect I would do pretty well in this type of interview unless the snippet is especially complicated and/or esoteric. In that case you might be screening for people who can talk but not actually code or people who can code but might not be the best communicator. Interestingly enough, if youre optimizing for specific outcomes, you may not need to screen out the latter. Engineers who struggle to communicate but are productive can be extremely successful given the right environment - including having someone on the team who knows who to work with various personalities and is technical enough. Just some rambling, but it's worth pointing out given the scarcity of engineering talent. Not everyone is going to be Paul Bucheit, ace product manager and engineer all wrapped into one.

lj3 9y ago
> In that case you might be screening for people who can talk but not actually code or people who can code but might not be the best communicator. From TFA and literally the thing that started this whole thread: > Furthermore, no matter what, poor technical ability seems highly correlated with poor communication ability – regardless of language, it’s relatively rare for candidates to perform well technically but not effectively communicate what they’re doing (or vice versa).
- meheleventyone 9y ago
  Right but that would also be true and exactly what you'd expect if interviewer mainly judged technical competency on ability to communicate. Since the form is self reported it's impossible to separate out whether the correlation is causal (poor communicators are poor technically) or due to interviewer bias (poor communicators have a harder time convincing interviewers of their technical chops) or even other factors (being flustered hurts both a candidates communication and technical skills). This is after all an advertorial piece of data spelunking not a study.
TheCowboy 9y ago
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but it's a valid comment. Even if someone disagrees, you clearly communicated a point that adds to the discussion. Many are taking the article at face value, and are assuming there are no methodological flaws and that this study has been repeated enough times to invalidate any comments to contrary. It also didn't turn this topic into a "case closed" matter, as it's too big of an unsolved problem for that. They also just analyzed interviews, but did they monitor job performance after the interviews and for how long? Additionally, differentiating between being a "good communicator" and a "good interviewee" is frequently overlooked. People too frequently rationalize their own interview approach as not the problem. Most candidates accept that they could improve and perform better at interviews, but a lot of people conducting the interviews don't think their process could do better.

vellum 9y ago

Each moment of silence makes the interviewee feel more tense. Instead of staring at them, why not leave the room while they read through the code and collect their thoughts? You could even have HR do it. When they arrive, HR hands them the code and instructions. Then, they read it for 15 minutes, until you walk in.

avip 9y ago

I'm absolutely not an "introvert" of any sort, but if you give me something I've never seen and ask me to reason about it, you'd better take a very wide step back, stfu, and wait for 10m - if you're to get any results from my slow brain.

notyourloops 9y ago

That's great! I really hope interviews like that become more common.

dando 9y ago

When you put people under the pressure of not having a job, a time limit and worst, the pressure of having someone looking over you, bugging you, and judging you, it can be incredibly hard to think straight or say anything at all. You can act buddy all you want, but people aren't stupid. They know if they take a few extra seconds too long, you're already thinking "this guy sucks"